Engaged to a Ghost

Just in time for Halloween, ghost sex enthusiast Amethyst Realm (yes, that's really her name) is now engaged to a ghost. Remember Amethyst Realm? She's the British woman who either has a real talent for connecting with spirits or a really weird case of sleep paralysis. She met her spectral fiancée on a recent trip to Australia and plan to be married in a handfasting ceremony in which their hands are tied together. How that's supposed to work with a ghost is anyone's guess. Not only that, once they are married she wants to start a family of "ghost babies" with him. How this is supposed to work is really anyone's guess. The biology of half-human, half-ghost children is poorly understood to say the least.

Amethyst Realm, 30, of Bristol, says she has had sex with at least 20 ghosts since she was a teenager but wasn’t looking for a new relationship when she went to Australia on a business trip. However, she says that changed on a nature hike when she came into contact with an apparition and felt sparks like none she’s ever known.

Realm didn’t think it could amount to anything serious because she says spirits tend to stay in one place, but something amazing happened on her flight home: She felt the presence of her lover on the plane, and apparently not stowed in cargo. “I couldn’t believe it. I was happy and excited — so excited that we had to do something about it. So we headed to the plane loo,” she told the Sun. “And, well, I am now a member of the Mile High Club.”

That was nine months ago and things have progressed to the point where Realm discussed her desire to marry and have her ghost’s baby on the British show “ITV This Morning” in August. The paranormal proposal reportedly occurred last week when the couple took a road trip to England’s Wookey Hole caves, according to the New York Post.

“There was no going down on one knee — he doesn’t have knees. But for the first time, I heard him speak,” she said, according to the paper. “I could actually hear his voice, and it was beautiful. Deep, sexy and real.” The couple are now choosing a ring but have not decided what kind it will be. Realm, supernaturally, is hoping her ring will have an amethyst in it, but she’s leaving it to her spirit lover to decide.

The couple plans to do a Pagan “handfasting” ceremony, in which their hands are tied together, symbolizing their connection, she said. “It’ll be somewhere in the English countryside. We haven’t discussed the details yet, but I think it will be quite a big do.”

If the ghosts (or at least this one) really can follow her around, I will say that doesn't sound like this can be fully explained by sleep paralysis. Also, as a magician I believe that spirits are real entities and in theory a person could have sex with or marry one, the main issue being their limited presence in the physical realm. There are many stories about this in the Western tradition, with the spirit in question usually referred to as a fairy or something similar. In more modern times, Aleister Crowley described the "mystic marriage" of the magician and the Holy Guardian Angel, and while this is probably not that it at least sounds related.

So let's say we believe her just for today. It is Halloween, after all! I hope that Realm and her spirit lover are happy together and have many ghostly babies - at least in part because I'm really curious about how a "ghost baby" will turn out.

Bad Satanists

In this case I don't mean bad as in evil nearly as much as I mean bad as in incompetent - and delusional on top of that. I suppose that isn't so surprising given that the "Satanists" in question are middle schoolers. I also am far less surprised than I maybe should be that they are from Florida, which seems to be accounting for a lot of weirdness these days.

Anyway, here's the story. Two Florida middle schoolers, 11 and 12 years old, were arrested for planning an attack on other students at their school. They told the police that they wanted to kill because they worshipped Satan. To be clear, I don't think that Satan had anything to do with it. It also sounds like they really didn't think any of it through.

Police say the pair, 11 and 12, told officers they were Satan worshippers and planned to kill at least 15 students at Bartow Middle School. On Tuesday they were searched by police who found weapons including a butcher's knife, pizza cutter and scissors.

They had a pizza cutter. Seriously? I suppose it's a little more effective as a murder weapon than, say, a spoon - but it's not that much more effective. "The Satanic Pizza Cutter Murders" has "meme" written all over it.

They told investigators they planned to drink the blood of their victims and "possibly eat their flesh". The search took place after a student informed a teacher about a possible attack in a school building. The two girls were waiting in the toilet for younger students that they could "overpower to be their victims", police said.

In a statement, Bartow police chief Joe Hall said a search of the girls' mobile phones revealed text messages plotting the attack, and officers had also found a handwritten note saying: "Go to bathroom to kill."

What this reminds me of more than anything else is the Slender Man stabbing case, with the main difference being that the young girls in question are talking about Satan rather than Slender Man. I'm sure the religious fundies are going to be up in arms about "Satanists" again, even though it's not clear that these girls know anything at all about Satanism besides him being a great big boogieman or something. Whatever they're doing, it has nothing to do with occultism or even what most practitioners call Satanism.

The good thing about this case is that the girls were caught before they could hurt anyone. In the Slender Man case another young girl was seriously injured - though she did survive. In that case it was pretty clear that one of the two girls was seriously mentally ill and the other was basically a follower-type who bought into her delusions.

We'll have to see what the psychologists have to say about this one, and here's hoping the girls get whatever help they need.

Revisiting the Intelligences and Spirits

When I put together my practical magick schemas for the planetary, zodiacal, and elemental work my goal was to standardize as much of the procedure as possible. I based everything on the success I was having with the zodiacal work such as what you see here in the monthly elixir rites and so forth. Those in turn had been based on a planetary series that we did years ago working with the planetary angels. None of those rituals called on additional spirits, just the corresponding angels, and they seemed to work pretty well. This was especially true when adding in components like offerings and additional devotional work.

I've been working with a lot of different ideas lately for revising the forms, and that requires more probability testing. This last week I was playing around with some of the new planetary stuff I've been doing and testing it against my older forms that included calling directly on the Intelligence and Spirit. What I found maybe shouldn't be surprising, but I found it to be such as the time. If you call in the Intelligence and Spirit in addition to the angel, your planetary rituals are significantly more powerful.

How did I not notice that? Three entities should be better than one, right?

Part of the issue is that I have continued to get better at magick in general. Nowadays I can do things with just the planetary angels that I used to have to go through the whole hierarchy of angel -> intelligence -> spirit to do. The rituals I did seemed to be working and I didn't notice any red flags. But going back to the older forms now, I have to admit the spells I tested worked really well, better than what I'm able to do these days with just the angel.

I also was influenced for awhile by the "project management" approach to conjuration which suggests that the entity you call on can itself call on any other entity that it rules in order to accomplish your charge. However, my latest set of experiments appear to show that this may very well not be the case. There's some nuance - it seems like you can use just the sigil of the angel to get into the hierarchy as long as you call upon the angel to help you summon the intelligence and the intelligence to help you summon the spirit, but I'm still playing around with that a bit trying to determine the most effective structure in absolute terms.

So I'm going to be doing two things based on this new information. First of all, I'm going to do more testing to see if I can replicate these findings. The other thing I'm going to do is go back through my planetary work posts and add the conjuration of the intelligence and spirit to that of the angel for practical operations. Also, if anyone else would like to play around with testing the differences, I'd be happy to answer questions so you can get going on it. Maybe this last set was a fluke, but I figure I'm going to go ahead and update the planetary work anyway because it's not going to hurt your results and it might make them better.

Check the planetary work posts later this week and I should have the changes to the conjurations in by then. And, as always, keep experimenting!

Ark Encounter Still Sinking

Another season has gone by, and it's time once more to point and laugh at Ken Ham's Ark Encounter, which is continuing to miss attendance projections just as was noted over the summer. The goofy creationist boondoggle saw a seventeen-percent drop in attendance this last September, even with school groups conducting field trips to the attraction (which is a whole other issue as far as the separation of church and state goes, but right now I'm just pointing and laughing).

It seems that the monumental difficulties Ham overcame trying to build the attraction were signs of things to come. First he tried to do it with donations, then with junk bonds issued by his church, and finally he closed the remaining gap with public subsidies he obtained by selling the state of Kentucky on wildly optimistic attendance projections.

The entertainment and educational complex that features dinosaurs interacting with humans, saw attendance this past September drop to 69,207 paying visitors — a 17 percent drop from last year’s same-month attendance of 83,330. As Hemant Mehta notes, that follows a trend of a declining — and accelerating — drop in attendance from last years numbers. Those declining numbers come even though public schools are using taxpayer funds to send school children to the museum to learn about creationism — a belief that all of creation is orchestrated by a divine being. According to American’s United for the Separation of Church and State, Ham’s Ark Encounter has been the beneficiary of millions of dollars of local and state tax breaks and subsidies.

“To help cover the cost of emergency services the small town [Williamstown] now must provide to the visitors of a large amusement park within its borders, city officials last year initiated a 50-cent fee on the tickets sold at the ark and a few smaller amusement venues in Williamstown. (This is the fee Ham and his company, Answers in Genesis, tried to avoid paying last summer by briefly switching the park’s status to nonprofit – a move that would have had a crushing long-term impact on property tax generation for the community but also nearly resulted in the park losing its $18 million state tourism subsidy.) “Americans United reports.

It seems to me that if God really wanted this thing built, why can't get more people to attend? Does Ham seriously worship a deity that lacks even the power to boost attendance at a theme park - you know, the kind of awesome power that any decent advertising agency already yields? This just raises more questions. You could make the point that we're talking about massive time scales required to create the universe - oh, except we're not! Ham says his deity did it instantly about six thousand years ago.

There really is only one conclusion when you think about. Ham's God doesn't care whether Ark Encounter lives or dies, because clearly he's not willing to lift a finger to help. It's like the Problem of Evil in theological thought, except I suppose here we could call it the Problem of Biblical Theme Park Attendance. If God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, why has he forsaken Ken Ham?

Maybe Ark Encounter was a bad idea from the start and the Almighty knew it all along.

Pat Robertson Changes His Mind

That wouldn't be much of a headline if it referred to just about any normal person. This is Pat Robertson, after all - the guy who in 2013 was still going on and on about the evils of Dungeons & Dragons, when no reasonable person has considered role-playing games dangerous or evil since at least 1990 or so. This week, though, the impossible happened. A week after telling his followers that bonesaw-murdering a journalist was totally okay as long as it didn't threaten American arms deals with the Saudis, Robertson changed his tune. In his latest statement he sounds almost like a reasonable person.

On “The 700 Club” today, Robertson had a radically different response to events, blasting the Saudis for engaging in premeditated murder and declaring that the U.S. cannot simply look the other way, regardless of what sort of arms deals or alliances exist between the two nations. “The Saudis aren’t telling the truth,” Robertson said. “They’ve lied and lied and lied and it’s been dissembling and half-truth and a little here and a little there … It was a premeditated murder.”

Robertson then praised and paraphrased a recent New York Times column by Maureen Dowd as he accused the Saudi government of having “bribed their way into the hearts of Americans” and railed against the Saudi role in 9/11 and past support for Osama bin Laden. “Oil or not, or arms deal or otherwise, we cannot be aligned with a group of people who have persecuted women and have kangaroo courts and have this religious police that is just incredibly bad,” Robertson said, as he called for Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman to be tried for Khashoggi’s murder.

“We still want to maintain a relationship with the Saudis,” Robertson continued, “but we cannot have this anymore, these things they’re doing. And we certainly cannot allow this man to go scot-free and we can’t excuse him or try to make any kind of accommodation with him. He is a murderer and he had a hit squad and there is no question that this was premeditated; this was a hit squad that came in, when they have body doubles and when they have bone saws and all this kind of stuff. There is no doubt they intended to kill this man, dismember his body, torture him and then hide the evidence and that is what they have been doing and nobody with any intelligence is buying it. They have been lying through their teeth.”

Cleary, it's a newsworthy story when Pat Robertson and I agree on something. It must have been especially hard for him, given that he (A) loves money and (B) loves theocracy but (C) hates Muslims. Clearly those conflicts have been rattling around in his brain and causing some erratic behavior. But hopefully this latest statement shows that he finally gets it - you can't be even marginally okay with murder and torture and call yourself a real Christian, especially if your stated motivation for doing so is financial.

It should also be noted that there are apparently a lot of self-proclaimed Christians out there who are still on the side of Robertson's original statement. They should get with the program too, because the Khashoggi case is an international outrage. We can't just shrug it off as business as usual.

Bible Museum Dead Sea Scrolls are Fakes

The Museum of the Bible, owned and operated by Hobby Lobby president Steve Green, recently found that five fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls that it had on display were fakes. Given the events of the Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal not that long ago, it seems to me that it pretty much serves them right. Wealthy evangelical Christians scouring the world for Biblical artifacts has created a whole market for counterfeit items, and it sounds like the Museum of the Bible was one of the latest groups taken in.

Five fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, some of the Museum of the Bible’s most prized artifacts, were exposed as fakes on Monday and pulled from displays. The museum, the brainchild of evangelical Christian businessman Steve Green, opened last year in Washington near the National Mall. The pieces, subjected to scientific tests in Germany, were deemed to have “characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin,” the museum said in a statement.

“Though we had hoped the testing would render different results, this is an opportunity to educate the public on the importance of verifying the authenticity of rare biblical artifacts,” chief museum curatorial officer Jeffrey Kloha said. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a series of fragments from approximately 930 manuscripts discovered near the Dead Sea in modern Israel during the late 1940s and 1950s. Dating back to the late third century B.C. and first century A.D., the scrolls provided academics with insights into Judaism at the time Christianity was born.

Doubts were raised as to the authenticity of the fragments held by the museum prior to its opening, due to a soaring increase in forgeries designed to fool wealthy American evangelical Christians, such as Green. Experts estimate that as many as 70 forged fragments of scrolls have been traded on the antiquities market since 2002, according to CNN. The museum said it would swap the fakes with three other fragments (but even those may not be real).

While I don't really believe in the idea of "karma" as the New Agers explain it, this is one of the problems inherent to buying items on the black market. The people you are dealing with are already criminals, so it really doesn't seem that much of a stretch to figure that they don't care whether an item is real or not as long as they get paid. Furthermore, they might just go ahead and forge the items themselves, counting on buyer cluelessness to line their pockets.

Either the Museum of the Bible needs to get more qualified experts to validate their purchases, or better still, get out of buying black market antiquities altogether. The countries they are effectively raiding in order to build their collection will thank them.

More on Magical Experiments

In last month's post on magical experiments, I discussed how I go about testing techniques and recording results, and why that approach to magick is superior to blindly following a tradition or trying to reconstruct techniques from centuries ago and somehow fit them into how we now live in the modern age. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about how we might go about verifying the effects of magick using the formal scientific method.

As I've said before, we're not quite there yet as far as practical magick is concerned. At this point research on mysticism is actually a little further along. The idea that spiritual practices can trigger specific altered brain states is a little more palatable to mainstream scientists, as it does not necessarily require a new metaphysical model to explain how it works. Neuroscientists have been very interested in meditation since the 1990's, and have conducted various studies with both novice and advanced meditators. The Buddhist tradition has been especially open to meditation studies, with the Dalai Lama going so far as to say that if the science doesn't match the teachings of the tradition, students should go with what the science tells them.

What we have been able to determine so far is that even with practice lasting only a few weeks, basic "mindfulness meditation" - a simplified non-sectarian method of meditation similar to shamatha and zazen - a physiological process dubbed the "relaxation response" is activated. This results in reduced stress and anxiety and improved attention. With advanced meditators, we have been able to identify a sort of "brain signature" related to the mystical state of samadhi or absorption which consists of high gamma brainwaves in certain areas and suppressed firing in others. As I see it, this work could be extended into practical magick by testing whether or not operations performed in these mystical states have a higher likelihood of success.

Damien Echols is an Occult Author

Back in 2015, Damien Echols wrote an article for Vice about how he used meditation and magical practices to keep himself sane on death row. Echols was one of the West Memphis Three, a group of teenagers convicted of the murder of a young boy mostly because they were "weirdo loners" and because Echols was interested in occultism.

That provided prosecutors with a motive back in the Satanic Panic days, since what the fundies were going around telling law enforcement is that occultists did what they did "just to be evil" - as opposed to, say, casting spells that have an actual function and are intended to produce practical results. Echols has now written a book on the practices he was able to keep up in prison. The book covers pretty standard Regardie/Golden Dawn methods - LRP, Middle Pillar, and so forth - but Echols offers his personal experience of how these rituals and techniques can be employed in extremely difficult circumstances.

Though our culture has consigned “magic” to fiction, stage illusions, or superstitions about dark practices, the magick Damien learned is an ancient Western tradition equal the Eastern practices of Buddhism, Taoism, and yoga in its wisdom and transformative power. Here he brings you an engaging and highly accessible guide for bringing magick into your own life, including:

• What is High Magick? Damien clears away the stigma and reveals the history and core teachings of this extraordinary art.
• The Four-Fold Breath—a foundational meditation practice to train your mind and body to channel subtle energies.
• The Middle Pillar—how to bring divine energy into the central channel of your body for empowerment and healing.
• The Qabalistic Cross—a centering technique to help you stay balanced and protected regardless of circumstances.
• The Lesser Rituals of the Pentagram—powerful practices for banishing negative energies and invoking energy to manifest your goals.
• Working with angelic beings and other spiritual allies to support your practice.
• Creating thoughtforms to assist you in your ongoing magickal development.
• Guidance for overcoming your doubts, enhancing your visualization skills, creating talismans, practicing magick ethically, and much more.

“Magick is a journey,” writes Damien. “It’s a continuously unfolding path that has no end. You can study and practice magick for the rest of your life and you will still never learn everything that it has to teach you.”

Mark Stavish used to say that "nobody ever got enlightened using the LBRP." That's probably a true statement since generally speaking you need to invoke in addition to banishing in order to make real spiritual progress. But I think it's safe to say that Echols offers a unique perspective on these rituals and their overall effectiveness. Yes, you can do magick on death row without tools or implements or anything really, and it can and does work. Echols' example shows that these well-known rituals can indeed by part of a comprehensive spiritual practice that expands and uplifts your consciousness.